sciencehabit writes “If you’ve ever cringed when your parents said ‘groovy,’ you’ll know that spoken language can have a brief shelf life. But frequently used words can persist for generations, even millennia, and similar sounds and meanings often turn up in very different languages. Now, a new statistical approach suggests that peoples from Alaska to Europe may share a linguistic forebear dating as far back as the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago. Indeed, some of the words we use today may not be so different than those spoken around campfires and receding glaciers.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur.
In the near future, the only difference between a smartphone, tablet, and a laptop will be the size of the screen. Hardcore gamers could play 3D intensive games in a smartphone, and Michael Bay could render “Transformers 4″ from his iPad. Otoy, an LA-based software company, has discovered a way to stream any application to any device, completely through a web browser. It’s difficult to overestimate the potential disruptiveness of Otoy, as a breakthrough streaming service could, in the near future, end the need for app stores and computer upgrades (see a demo below). Otoy has a habit of impressing the tech press with its surprising ability to stream 3D intensive graphics to devices that shouldn’t be able to run them. Since Otoy’s 2009 demo, there’s been a rush of companies in the ever more crowded “cloud” services industry, such as Onlive’s streaming video gaming. Up until now, video games were shackled to certain consoles, mobile apps to particular app stores, and software to particular operating systems. If we didn’t own an iPhone, Windows, and or an Xbox, we couldn’t use a lot of cool applications. But, every device runs Internet browsers, and specifically, the JavaScript which Otoy utilizes to render the software. Soon, the monopoly that iOS, Windows, and Xbox wields over users will end, and the freedom to use any piece of software on any device will become the norm. Even cooler, we may no longer need to shell out $ 3,000 on a high-end laptop to run games or graphics software. At Otoy’s media event with Mozilla and Autodesk at San Francisco headquarters, we saw the graphics-hungry first person shooter, Unreal, run seamlessly on an iPhone. In essence, Otoy brings a supercomputer to your phone or tablet. “That’s going to have huge implications in my business” said celebrity talent agent and Otoy investor, Ari Emanuel, who sees the ability of more filmmakers to make movies in less time and for less money. Currently, it takes an entire day to render movie-quality scenes. With Otoy, globally distributed teams could work in real time (some at the beach) without having to stagger their work for an entire day between revisions. So, how much will it cost if Otoy completely replaces my computer needs? About $ 300, estimates Urbach, based on 8 hours of use per day for consumer applications (Otoy charges by computing power and is currently targeting artists). There is
A little less than a year ago, a little company called LinkSmart launched to help publishers use text links to get their readers reading more. Now it has raised $ 5 million in Series B funding to take its technology for growing audiences and make it more widely available. The financing was led by Foundry Group and Costanoa Venture Partners.
Peer-to-peer lending platform 
I’ve found that when people visit San Francisco, it’s not unusual to hear them ask something like: “No seriously, is there a coffee shop on every block in this city?” Yes, San Francisco likes coffee. So do a lot of cities. Busy people thrive on coffee, especially in the tech industry. In fact, some would even say that a substantial amount of coffee 
The builders of a 
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 NY, eBay’s CEO John Donahoe talked to Bloomberg’s chief content editor Norm Pearlstine about how the company screens its acquisitions and how he keeps founders from leaving after the acquisition. Since becoming eBay’s CEO, Donahoe said, the company has made about 20 acquisitions. Currently, fifteen of the founders that joined eBay and PayPal after their companies were acquired are still at eBay and most of them are in executive positions. After the company acquired Zong in 2011, for example, Zong’s founder David Marcus became PayPal’s vice president for mobile. After essentially getting tested in that position, he became the President of PayPal last year. Similarly, when eBay acquired Hunch (also in 2011), its team of co-founders, including Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis joined the company (with Dixon leaving after about a year). Today, this team is in charge of eBay’s homepage. Donahoe believes that in order to keep founders from leaving, eBay needs to give them the opportunity to grow inside the company. Because of this, he is also most interested in acquiring companies where the management team believes that they can execute their vision inside eBay. “We are always looking for companies that have a strong vision,” Donahoe said. “And then we allow them to innovate at a higher level.” The kind of founders he likes, he said, are “founders come to us and say we founded our company to do x and would like to take it to the next level.” In his view, this strategy has been a key ingredient to eBay’s and PayPal’s success. Acquisitions, in his view, drive innovation inside a large company like eBay and bringing in founders as executives – and giving them monetary incentives to stay as well, of course – is a key part of this strategy. As for the details of these incentives, Donahoe noted that “most of the founders make money in the acquisition In some cases the acquisition price is tied to staying for a two-three year period. But yes – we provide incentives to stay. We provide good compensation, but at the end of the day, we need to create a culture where they can realize their visions.” He does, for example, regularly meet with founders to discuss the state of the company. These discussions have, for example, lead to the redesign of the eBay’s homepage. It’s that kind of impact,
Another simple but neat Evernote hack that came out of the 24-hour Disrupt NY Hackathon earlier today was Squirrel. Created by coder duo Zainab Ebrahimi and Jabari Bell, the hack turns articles Evernote readers have saved for reading later into a personalised newsletter. So, unlike the average email newsletter, Squirrel is populated with content the user actually wants to read.
Dosi.io is a new Chrome extension that builds a better dossier at the top of LinkedIn profiles where it helps you determine who’s worth your time. Once installed, LinkedIn stalking gets a lot more interesting, as Dosi.io displays more information about the person in question by pulling in additional data from CrunchBase, GitHub and AngelList. It also displays a score indicating that person’s importance to you in terms of how well they match your networking goals. The extension, built here at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, is currently designed for the developer crowd, but the creators intend to bring it to other communities in the future. You can think of Dosi.io as something like a Rapportive for LinkedIn, explains co-creator Niles Brooks, who’s also the co-founder of sustainable restaurant guide Clean Plates. He says he came up with the idea for the extension the midnight before the hackathon’s start. Kenneth Chen, a software developer in the finance industry, had been thinking about things along the same lines, he tells us, and decided to team up on the project along with third member, Vijith Assar. In a nutshell, the extension’s secret sauce is a combination of the number of followers a person has and the general impact they might have. From AngelList, it knows whether or not you have an account – a signal in and of itself – as well as the number of followers you have there. That information also helps Dosi.io know what companies to query up on CrunchBase, where it learns about the investments a company has, the sale price of a company, and the total amount of funding a person has raised over their lifetime. And on GitHub, Dos.io learns the commits you’ve made, the number of public repos you’re involved in, and again, the number of followers the person has. All of this data is boiled down into a simple visualization that appears directly above LinkedIn profiles, which also shows you a person’s overall Dosi.io score. Ranging from 1 to 10, the score is meant to convey how much of your time that person warrants. Brooks says he imagines this score becoming even more useful one day as a Google Glass application using facial recognition, where it could help users better network while at conferences and other events. (Nope, not creepy at all!) The extension today is client-side JavaScript, and though it’s live, they’re running
Superfly 
While Pinterest is still rolling out its brand new look to users, it decided to listen to some feedback along the way and make some tweaks. Since the site relies heavily, or completely, on its users pinning things to boards like crazy, some features that were dropped from the new design were re-added due to popular demand. One of the features that caused the community to clammer the most was “Pinned By,” which let people see who originally pinned an item. This was a way to discover new people to follow and Pinterest has brought it back: Additionally, the mentioning friends feature using an @ symbol has returned, yet another way to discover new people to follow. Notice a trend here? It seems like the new design was limiting users on how they could find new friends and boards to interact with. The company says that finding friends from Twitter and Facebook that are on Pinterest is back, too. Other than the features that were reintroduced, Pinterest has improved its search functionality by adding auto-suggest, something that helps people out when looking for things. This has been a popular feature on Google’s search product, making the experience way less aggravating than looking at an empty white box for minutes: Along with search, Pinterest has moved your recent activity notifications, including older ones, to the top right corner, another move that could increase engagement. Things that the company are thinking on and might roll out soon are rearranging pins and creating a board within a board. Let’s call that feature “Boardception.” Still, it’s clear that remaining true to the original experience tops all new bells and whistles. Other social sites like Twitter and Facebook tend to roll out features slowly, getting instant feedback from people along the way before things are released to the masses. By letting users opt-in to trying out the new look, Pinterest gets beta testers who are ready, willing and able to voice their complaints, since that’s what people end up voicing anyways. If you’re still rocking the old design on Pinterest, just click “Get it now” after you log in:
MuleSoft has acquired Programmable Web from Alcatel-Lucent effectively marking the telecommunication company’s exit from a core API community. For MuleSoft, a data integration company, the deal provides a vehicle for it to offer what it calls a GitHub for APIs that will integrate its APIhub with Programmable Web’s API database and rich editorial focus on the correlating market space. For Programmable Web, it provides a stable home, a place where it can extend its API database to a community that can build out apps using the MuleSoft APIhub platform. Programmable Web will continue to maintain its blog and API database. It will remain an independent entity and connect with the MuleSoft APIhub. The hub will serve as a place for getting the support developers often need when integrating APIs. Developers will collaborate on the APIs, similarly to the way a service like GitHub works. The larger goal is to help companies connect its legacy, on-premise systems to third-party services and platforms. Companies need to get their data out into the market. APIhub with Programmable Web will help accomplish that. MuleSoft essentially provides a message bus and a cloud platform for managing data integrations and connecting data points to services such as Workday or Salesforce. Alcatel-Lucent acquired Programmable Web in 2010. At the time, Alcatel-Lucent had hopes for fostering a developer ecosystem and build out its own API management strategy. But the effort never really seemed to take hold. Hopefully, it will be a different story with Programmable Web part of MuleSoft.
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